Family pulls $1M scholarship fund from NC university, citing anti-DEI policy
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- A prominent Black family is pulling a $1 million scholarship fund from UNC Wilmington.
- The 2024 Equality Policy forced the university to broaden the scholarship’s mission.
- Current recipients will continue receiving the scholarship through graduation.
A prominent Black family is pulling a $1 million scholarship fund from UNC Wilmington after the school said it could no longer gear their money toward African American students.
The change stems from the UNC System’s Equality Policy, which bans diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at public universities.
The 30-year-old endowed scholarship was available to North Carolina students with an interest in medicine and a “commitment to the African American community.” It’s named for Dr. Leroy Upperman, a prominent physician and education advocate in Wilmington for more than 50 years. The university’s Upperman African American Cultural Center was named in his honor in 1996.
Since his death, Linda Upperman Smith has supported her father’s legacy at UNC Wilmington by supervising the endowment and mentoring scholarship recipients.
Until now.
WHQR first reported this story.
The decision to pull the money
Each year, Upperman’s endowment, now valued at $1 million, generated approximately $50,000 in scholarship money, according to UNC Wilmington. At any given time, that supports approximately four students at the university. Since 2003, when the university started collecting data on it, 36 students have received the scholarship.
But this spring, the university told Smith that it could no longer limit the scholarships to students with a commitment to the African American community. It would have to broaden its mission to remain in compliance with UNC System policy.
Smith said that conflicts with her and her father’s vision. Their family’s endowment was specifically designed to increase recruitment and retention of African American students with a desire to pursue medicine.
So, she’s backing out.
“The university wasn’t able to meet the terms of the agreement it made with my father,” Smith told The News & Observer. “Once the last of the three remaining students has graduated, we will move the funds. We still have the power of the purse.”
“As long as the people in power are not sensitive to issues of diversity, equity and inclusion, and people in this state are not willing to push back against these policies, then I think education will suffer in many ways,” Smith continued. “The changes have moved things back more than 30 years. In the blink of an eye, we’re back at square one. I’m believing more and more that the people in power just don’t care.”
She briefly considered keeping the endowment at the university and allowing it to grow, waiting for the political tide to change. But she’s not sure that will happen anytime soon. She says she’s taking the money to an HBCU, likely Howard University, where her dad earned his medical degree. It’s more likely for the scholarship to reach Black students at an HBCU, she said, rather than at UNC Wilmington, where Black students make up a small percentage of the total population.
Smith has heard from many former Upperman Scholars in the wake of her decision about the scholarship. That includes UNC Wilmington alum Martin Jarmond, now the director of athletics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
As for the Upperman African American Cultural Center at UNC Wilmington, Smith says she will continue to support it, as long as “African American” remains a part of its name, and its mission to support retention remains unchanged. It has already undergone significant restructuring: The center, once independent, is now operating with a centralized staffing model under the umbrella of Student Success.
Scholarship review at UNC Wilmington
Over the last year, UNC Wilmington reviewed all 81 privately funded scholarships at the school. It found 18 that it deemed to be out of compliance with the Equality Policy, vice chancellor for university advancement Eddie Stuart told The N&O.
Each of those 18 scholarships contains a requirement that the student must have an interest or commitment to a particular community.
“This is what we have used, over many years, to connect the scholarship to a particular community without explicitly saying the student has to be of a particular race,” Stuart said.
But in 2024, the UNC System replaced its policies mandating diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, with an Equality Policy that requires institutional neutrality and prohibits compelled speech. It’s been more than two years since then, but UNC Wilmington is still catching up, Stuart said.
“The more we moved along, the more we tried to understand the spirit of the [Equality Policy] and how to be compliant with it," Stuart continued. “Because of [the policy’s] explicit prohibition of compelled speech, we felt like asking an applicant to make a statement on their interest in or a commitment to a particular community was, in fact, using compelled speech to qualify a student for a scholarship opportunity.”
Most donors, Stuart said, are working with the university to update the language and the mission of their scholarships to remain in compliance with the policy. Later this summer, each UNC System campus will have to file a report to the Board of Governors regarding their compliance with the Equality Policy.
For all the sterile talk of policy and compliance, Smith’s decision isn’t completely unemotional for Stuart. For one, Stuart and Smith have known one another for decades. When Stuart came to UNCW in 2000, Smith served on the university’s board of trustees.
Additionally, Stuart feels the university is losing a valuable asset.
“These scholarships in particular were designed to help UNCW create a campus that resembles the world around it, which is what every university wants to do,” Stuart said. “When you have to find different ways to do that, it challenges the institution to look at other avenues to make your institution attractive to a broad group of prospective students. Anytime you lose a scholarship opportunity, it creates a setback. I’m sorry to see it go away.”
Current recipients will still receive the scholarship through graduation.
This story was originally published July 14, 2026 at 5:20 AM with the headline "Family pulls $1M scholarship fund from NC university, citing anti-DEI policy."
